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The Adventures Of Jimmy Jam And Sally Slam: The Birthday Sham Pt. 5

Lt. Newton let the phone ring more times than a person should have to before hanging up and calling the Supernatural Disaster Hotline again, just to make sure she had dialed the number correctly. No one answered the second time either. She hung the phone up again and sighed.

After a moment of inner recalibration, she sighed again and dialed her friend's number into her desk phone.

"Hi Nicole, it's Nancy. Do you have a minute?"

Nicole did have a minute. Like most people in town she had noticed that there had been more monsters than usual of late and was more than happy to help the local authorities make sense of what was happening and maybe find a solution. She, like most people in town, liked things better without monsters and was more than willing to help in any way she could.

"Thanks! I'll keep you posted. Be careful out there," Lt. Newton said before hanging up and calling Morgan, Nicole's witch-cousin, who also happened to be Sally's Mom's Sister and Sally's Aunt.

"I've never talked to a real witch before," Nacy thought while the phone was ringing, "I wonder how it's different from talking to non-witches?"

She didn't get to find out as the call went straight to voicemail on the second ring.

"Well, huh," she said before leaving a detailed voicemail message and hanging up.

Meanwhile, at the Society's Head Quarters, things were a mess. Freak Andy's hench-people had, in addition to making a mess of the place, captured every on-duty member in the building and were busy locking them away in the basement. With all the magickial people out of the way, there would be nothing to keep Freak Andy from doing whatever he wanted. Whatever that was.

Gustav was missing, GrandFather was kidnapped, Jimmy and Sally were gone, Anne was captured as well. All the other members of The Society were either locked away in the basement or away on business. There was no one left who knew how to deal with these sorts of things.

Lt. Newton was currently the town's only hope and she didn't have a clue as to how to proceed. She learned very little about monsters and magick at the police academy. While she waited for Morgan to return her call, she busied herself with some internet research about policing supernatural situations and resolving monster infestations.

***

"Jimmy," Sally said to who she hoped was Jimmy. It was too dark to know for sure if there was anyone else in the room with her. She was suspended from the ceiling on a chain and swayed to and fro on a slight breeze, like a kite dangling from a tree.

She wasn't sure how long she'd been this way. Longer than a school day, that was for sure. She waited and waited but there was no answer, either Jimmy wasn't in the room, he was being a jerk, or worse. Sally tried not to think about all the bad things that could be happening and focused on the good instead. She was alive. That was good. She wasn't upside down, that was really good. This would have been all the more difficult, she thought to herself, if she had to do it upside down. Her list ended there, and she closed her eyes to think.

Jimmy, on the other hand, was upside down. He was hanging from his feet, suspended over a pit of giant spiders while a goblin yelled at him in a language he didn't understand.

Jimmy guessed he was being asked questions and wondered what kind of supervillain hires non-English speaking interrogators to interrogate an English speaker. This sort of incompetence made him angry. Not angry enough to become immune to giant spiders' venom or to break the chains that held him suspended above them, but pretty close. He got angry enough to swing back and forth and gathered enough speed to headbutt his goblin tormenter in the face, knocking him to the ground.

It was a brave thing to do, but like many brave things, it was also pretty stupid and only made things worse for Jimmy, and maybe everyone else too. The goblin stood up and smacked Jimmy across the knee with a pipe. Jimmy just stared. The goblin backed away a few steps and resumed his questioning. Jimmy closed his eyes and tried to think.

GrandFather and Anne were still encased in spider webs and unconscious, still in the back of Freak Andy's van, which had just recently ran a red light on it's way back to the abandoned fireworks factory where Sally and Jimmy were dangling and dangling while being yelled at and hit, respectively.

Freak Andy was smiling as he almost caused yet another accident on the way back to his hideout. He loved making people as miserable as he was. Making people as sad as he was was the only thing that made him happy. He had to be careful though because if he was too good at making people sad, he got too happy and began to feel bad about himself and how he acted. That never went well for him, or those around him.

He never wanted to be evil, he told himself that it wasn't his fault. Those around him gave him no choice. He had to be mean, rotten, destructive, and evil or he might accidentally see how he was the only person to blame for how his life was going and having to accept responsibility for himself would (more than likely) cause him to explode like a robot trying to solve the liar's paradox.

There wasn't too much of a chance of that happening though, Freak Andy had no concept of how evil he was. To him, he was just trying to make himself feel better. A lot of evil in the world happens because people feel less valuable than they really are and stop seeing all the love that's available to them. It was all too late for that kind of thinking. Freak Andy was beyond redemption.

Dealing with the unredeemable is something no one should have to do, it's something best left to trained professionals.

"Dang," Nacy sighed, "there's very little useful information about this sort of thing on the internet. I have to do something," she thought as she was buckling her gun-belt and grabbing a shotgun from the rack on the wall behind her.

"Monsters are just criminals with fangs. I know plenty about criminals. This can't be as difficult as I'm making it."

Maybe it was, maybe it wasn't. I can't say exactly what Lt. Nancy Newton was thinking about right them or what her plan was. I can say that, with a bit of luck, we'll find out next time.